An international team led by the Italian photographer Filippo Blengini created a 365-Gigapixel Panorama of Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, and the gigantic image becomes the World’s largest photoSee Note. The previous record-holder, published in 2013, was a 320-gigapixel shot of London, taken from atop the BT Tower.

The huge image, published on the project’s site In2White, is created by stitching together 70,000 HD photos taken at 3,500 meters (11,483 feet). The shooting took 15 days in late 2014 and the average temperature was -10 °C (14 °F). The post-production took further two months.

We, humans, are changing our planet drastically that scientists say the world entered a completely a new geological era called “Anthropocene”. But, it seems we are not shaping only the surface and the atmosphere of Earth, human activities are changing our near-space environment as well. The change is so big that NASA’s Van Allen probes have detected a human-made barrier surrounding Earth.

Oymyakon, a village in Oymyakonsky Ulus of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), the Russian Federation, is considered as the coldest inhabited place on Earth. On February 6, 1933, a temperature of −67.7 °C (−90 °F) was recorded at Oymyakon’s weather station. The village is considered as one of the Pole of ColdsNotes 1 of the northern hemisphere.

We see images and videos from the International Space Station (ISS) where astronauts floating in the space freely. That’s because they’re in the space, so there is no gravitational force of Earth there, right?

Wrong.

The International Space Station is in Low Earth OrbitSee notes 1 with an altitude of between 330 and 435 km (205 and 270 mi). It is so close to the Earth that on a clear day easily visible to the naked eye from the ground as it is the third brightest object in the sky (NASA has actually launched a new interactive map at its Spot the Station web site). At that altitude, the Earth’s gravity is about 90 percent of what it is on the planet’s surface – still pretty strong, right? To reduce the gravity of the Earth by a factor of one million, one needs to be at a distance of 6 million kilometers (around 3,728,227 miles) from the Earth – more than fifteen times the distance between the Earth and Moon.

Another unique and interesting friendship between a wild reptile and a man, like the famous story of Chito and Pocho. This Japanese man, named Nobumitsu Murabayashi, keeps a giant caiman as a pet, and even walks with him in the town center of Kure City, Hiroshima, Japan – with the permission of the city hall.

Ancient symbols carved into stone at Göbekli Tepe (an archaeological site in Turkey) tell the story of a big comet impact more than 13,000 years ago, scientists think. The devastating impact triggered a mini ice-age which drove many mammals weighing more than 40 kg to extinction.

According to an article published by New Scientist, carvings made on a pillar known as the “Vulture Stone” in Göbekli Tepe suggest that a swarm of comet fragments hit the Earth in around 11000 BC.

A beautiful image published by NASA, taken by the unmanned Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, shows the Earth between the rings of Saturn. The image is taken on April 12, 2017.

“Consider again that dot [Earth]. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

The first new global map of Earth from space at night since 2012 has been released by the NASA scientists. The nighttime look of our planet is dubbed the “Black Marble”. But why?

On December 7, 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon took a photo of Earth from the space, at a distance about 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles). This image, with the official NASA designation AS17-148-22727, became known as “The Blue Marble”.

In fact, it was not the first clear image of Earth taken from the space – similar photos had already been taken as early as 1967. But, the 1970s were the scene of a big surge in environmental activism. For example, on April 22, 1970, the first “Earth Day” organized by Gaylord Nelson, former senator of Wisconsin, and Denis Hayes, Harvard graduate student. Millions of people gather in the United States for the event.

Now we’re living on a warm, hospitable planet. As Carl Sagan has said “That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” We, humans, are the unquestionable rulers of our little oasis in a hostile universe. But all things must pass. The life on Earth, even the planet itself, won’t last forever. What’s more, the humans may go extinct before our planet (and probably before the life on it) dies out. Here some possible (and horrible) ways how planet Earth could die.

On his most recent trip the International Space Station (Expedition 48),recently-retired NASA astronaut Jeff Williams has recorded a great HD video of Earth using an Ultra High Definition video camera.

Here in the video titled “Jeff’s Earth” below, he shares some of those images and talks about the beauty of the planet, the variety of things to see, and the value of sharing that perspective with everyone who can’t go to orbit in person.